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2wd Automatic Supermoto - VisionAR

GOOGLE for information on the company ‘Visionar Srl’ and you’ll be faced with an under-construction homepage sporting a rather childish sketch of a bike and the promise of a 'new special vehicle coming soon to the world'.

Promises like that often go no further, but a new patent filing by the firm shows that there really are some designs in hand for a new bike.

The wire-frame patent drawings have some similarity to the homepage sketch, but notable differences as well. The weird single-sided front fork is gone, replaced by a pair of upside-downers, and there’s a more conventional frame and swingarm in evidence too.

What is evident on both the VisionAR homepage (the name is styled like that, with the last two letters capitalised) is that the bike is envisioned as being two-wheel-drive. The sketch seems to show hub-mounted electric motors at both ends, with a central battery pack in the frame, but the patents show a more sensible layout. This includes a fairly normal central section incorporating the battery pack and a main electric motor that drives the rear wheel by chain (or perhaps belt). However, there’s also a second, smaller electric motor in the front hub.

The use of a hub-mounted motor on the front wheel is something that we’ve seen before. KTM has patented a similar idea and Yamaha’s PES-2 concept bike also used it. As far as electric bike innovations go, it’s one of the better ones as it should allow for a significant amount of regenerative braking, recharging the battery as you slow.

The additional drive available on the front wheel might help in some circumstances, particularly if it’s backed up with a suitably advanced traction control system that’s able to juggle the amount of power being fed to each wheel.

The bike’s supermoto-style shape also hints that an off-road version would be easy to make, and that might be better suited to take advantage of two-wheel-drive.